...but quickly realized that I had a great knot in my stomach, on the edge of nausea, and that it was just a matter of time before I exposed myself to an image that would keep me vomiting for many days or years to come...

I agree with Apo....... And
at the risk of a week's worth of messages proclaiming what a fool, prig, prude or.... (insert your pejorative here) I am, I can't see why Larry insists on walking on the disgusting side of life.

Being congenitally ignorant, I checked out the site to which Larry, generous as always, provided us with a link. After perusing it, I must say that I fail to comprehend why, Katy, you allow yourself to get so exercised by the link. That you, like Apo, might not regard the humour as particularly appealing is understandable - I doubt that I would myself - but really, are the likes of Harris Glenn Milstead and John Waters something about which to be so upset ? Are not wars, for example, motivated by greed and a lust for power and justified to the public by means of lies and deception far more characteristic of the «disgusting side of life» and should not they, rather than a plump chap in drag, lead not merely to nausea, knots in the stomach, and emesis, but also to anger and determined opposition ?...

Henri? what in my post said I was upset? or exercised?????? knots in the stomach? Where does your imagination lead? being disgusted with disgusting things is not being angry. That you find nothing disgusting about this deliberately disgusting "Divine" Harris Glenn Milstead, who I see not as recalcitrant but reprobate, is telling. But it's just an observation, not a recrimination, again I don't see why Larry likes to walk on the disgusting side of life.

Katy
I knew I was "in" for it. rebuttle by humiliation and exaggreation.

KatyBr wrote:Henri? what in my post said I was upset? or exercised?????? knots in the stomach?

Apo :

but quickly realized that I had a great knot in my stomach, on the edge of nausea, and that it was just a matter of time before I exposed myself to an image that would keep me vomiting for many days or years to come...

Katy :

I agree with Apo ...

To me, Katy, the use of the word «disgust» implies moral revulsion on the part of the user. That is what I meant by you being «exercised». The capacity to be exercised, to be disgusted, to be morally revolted is vital - consider the alternative ! What I was questioning is your wasting this precious capacity on Glenn Milstead and John Waters, who, if one does not care for them, can be safely ignored. The practices I mentioned, however, we ignore at our peril....

Could perhaps, extrapolating from this AP article, the crisis could be solved by specific elimination of «Divine-recognition» cells ?...

Henri

June 23, 2005

Brain Cells 'Recognize' Famous People

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 7:46 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Halle Berry? Jennifer Aniston? Everybody knows them. And now a surprising study finds that even individual cells in your brain act as if they recognize them.

The work could help shed light on how the brain stores information, an expert said.

When scientists sampled brain cell activity in people who were scrutinizing dozens of pictures, they found some individual cells that reacted to a particular celebrity, landmark, animal or object.

In one case, a single cell was activated by different photos of Berry, including some in her ''Catwoman'' costume, a drawing of her and even the words, ''Halle Berry.''

The findings appear in a part of the brain that transforms what people perceive into what they'll eventually remember, said Dr. Itzhak Fried of the University of California, Los Angeles, a senior investigator on the project.

The findings do not mean that a particular person or object is recognized and remembered by only one brain cell, Fried said. ''There is not only one cell that codes for Jennifer Aniston. That would be impossible,'' Fried said.

Nor do they mean that a given brain cell will react to only one person or object, he said, because the study participants were tested with only a relatively limited number of pictures. In fact, some cells were found to respond to more than one person, or to a person and an object.

What the study does suggest, Fried and colleagues say in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, is that the brain appears to use relatively few cells to record something it sees. That's in contrast to the idea that it uses a huge network of brain cells instead.

It's surprising that an individual neuron would react so specifically to a given person, said the study's other senior investigator, Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology. ''It's much more specific than people used to think.''

Charles Connor, who studies how the brain processes visual information but who didn't participate in the new study, called the results striking.

Nobody would have predicted that conceptual information relating to Aniston, for example, would be signaled so clearly by single cells, said Connor, who works at Johns Hopkins University.

The ''really dramatic finding,'' he said, is that a single brain cell can respond so consistently to completely different pictures of a given person. ''That will surprise everybody,'' Connor said.

The part of the brain the researchers studied draws heavily on memory as well as signals from what the eye sees, so the result may illustrate how memory is represented in the brain and how it relates to visual signals, he said.

He noted that in one participant, one brain cell responded both to Aniston and to Lisa Kudrow, her co-star on the TV hit ''Friends.''

''That's a tantalizing glimpse at how neurons represent concepts like membership in the cast of `Friends,' and could lead to much more extensive studies of how conceptual information is organized in human memory,'' he said.

The researchers tested eight people with epilepsy who'd had electrodes placed in their brains so that doctors could track down the origins of their seizures. The electrodes monitored the activity of a small fraction of cells in a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobe.

The researchers kept track of which cells became activated as the participants looked at images of people, landmarks and objects on a laptop computer. One participant had a brain cell that reacted to different pictures of Aniston, for example, but was not strongly stimulated by other famous or non-famous faces.

Oddly, when that participant was shown photos of Aniston paired with actor Brad Pitt, from whom Aniston later separated, the brain cell didn't respond.

I think that before you judged me so harshly, Henri, you should have seen a John Waters movie, esp. one from the early days, starring Divine! I learned my lesson about 1 min into one!

As for others things that should invoke disgust, the constant and unsubstantiated claims of the left about the motivations for the Iraqi war are very high on my list, second only to the Left’s (hardly tacit) support for Islamist terrorists.

Anyway, in my mind, “Drag Queens,” plump or not, are a subcategory of clowns and I do not like clowns! And John Waters is deliberately disgusting/shocking. There is nothing morally, or comically, salvageable from his parade of depravity.

So, please don’t think that I love war or that I am insensitive to its horrors, but sometimes war is necessary. This is one of those times, no matter what the Anti-Americans say.

Why don’t we reserve our intellectual disgust for totalitarian regimes like we find in Cuba, North Korea and China, to mention a few?

Where is the Left's outcry for the Irani student protesters thrown from their dormitory windows or roofs, and the women still being stoned to death for adultery, and all the human beings imprisoned or worse for their crime of “atheism?”

Should we wait for the UN to do something about it?

What about the genocide and enslavement of Christian tribes in the Sudan?

Where is the outcry of the international community?

The Left is very selective in its condemnations.

The war in Iraq is justified. Whether or not we were to find WMD or sticks with sharpened points, we had to know! We had to let Saddam know that we were true to our word, and that his lack of compliance would be met, not with another UN threat, another empty ultimatum, but with real military action. I do not offer any after-the-fact justification.

Apo

Last edited by Apoclima on Sat Jun 25, 2005 2:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

'Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.' -Max Planck

Apo, it was not at all my intention to judge you, harshly or otherwise - who am I to judge my fellows ? Indeed, as I wrote in my posting, I doubt that Mr Waters' films, with or without Divine, would appeal to my tastes, even though I probably should not react with knots in the stomach. My point was that of the many human things that are not of serious importance, the Walker-Milstead collaboration ranks high on the list. Let those who are amused by such films see them, while we others let them pass ! Vulgarity is presumably a necessary part of human society - at any rate, I know of none free from it. Personally, I find Larry's postings on current or earlier popular culture often enlightening and always amusing, but in the end, who really cares ?...

Rather, I thought, there are other human affairs which I (in contrast to you ? - from posts like your last, I think not !) do regard as serious. As you know, we disagree entirely on the wars of aggression fronted by Mr Bush, as we do on most other political, philosophical, and scientific questions, but these are, nonetheless, matters which are worth discussing and worth getting passionate about ! Thus, I am glad to see postings dealing with these matters even if I disagree with their content. My only caveat is that we should attempt to avoid letting disagreements originating in different views on these serious matters (as well as those less serious, like Divine) lead to personal attacks on each other. As I have written elsewhere, I think we have succeeded reasonably well on this forum, and I hope our success will continue....

Apo, I must read very different newspapers and journals than you do, for much of that which you say the «Left» ignores, is, in fact, constantly discussed and analysed in their journals. Could it be, rather, that your outrage arise from the fact that not only the crimes of the «bad guys» are there exposed, but also those of the so-called «angels» ?...

A positive interpretation, BD, for which I thank you ! Another would be that, now that I'm back in Stockholm, until I managed to get wired from home I'm restricted to using the computers at the local library branch - which inevitably leads to time constraints and problems with uncorrected typos. But, if you will be so kind as to forgive errors and similar inadvertancies, I shall do my best to stay in touch....

The quiet conscience is an invention of the devil.Dr.Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

You are wrong, Henri! There are good guys and bad guys in this world. And fence sitters are either one or the other!

Good guys make mistakes, and so do bad guys, and that's what we are counting on.

On the relations between Syria and China, al-Almar said al-Baath Arab Socialist Party and the Syrian people pay great attention to the principled stand on the important issue of China's unification. For the Chinese nation and other nations as well, the unification of the great motherland is the biggest goal to achieve.

When speaking of the development mode and achievements of China's reforms and opening to the outside world, al-Ahmar is full of praise. Al-Ahmar, who will pay his fifth visit to China in coming September, said that I feel honored to have many opportunities to visit China, and meet Chinese leaders in Beijing and Damascus, which helps enhance and develop the traditional goodwill relations between Syria and China.

American citizens are threatened by rampant violent crimes and severeinfringement of civil rights by law enforcement departments."Violent crimespose a serious threat to people's lives," said the record.

This is what I am talking about! The Truth is what is expedient for the Marxist revolution, everything else is Lies.

Well, God bless the USA! We will have democracy and freedom, and not the Swedish, not the French, and not Chinese way.

And we will root out every terrorist from every terrorist nation, be they communist, socialist or Islamofascist. And if the ideology of a socialist peace gets in the way of understanding that, join the Islamists for all I care!

If not in body, in spirit!

Apo

'Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.' -Max Planck